[CentOS] Web server files ownership?
Bill Gee
bgee at campercaver.net
Fri Jul 7 11:26:36 UTC 2017
On Friday, July 7, 2017 5:25:29 AM CDT Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a series of websites hosted on two CentOS 7 servers, using Apache
> virtual hosts. One of these servers is a "sandbox" machine, to test
> things and to fiddle around.
>
> Since Apache is running as system user 'apache' and system group
> 'apache', I thought it sensible that hosted files be owned by that process.
>
> # ls -l /var/www/html/
> total 24
> drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:37 default
> drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 10:01 phpinfo
> drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:41 slackbox-mail
> drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:37 slackbox-site
> drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:42 unixbox-mail
> drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:38 unixbox-site
Hi Niki -
Pete Biggs has weighed in with one way of setting Apache permissions. His
basic contention is right on: The user under which the Apache process runs
should not have write permissions.
The method we adopted at my last job goes like this: All of our CentOS7
servers are members of Active Directory. We created an AD group which
contains the user names of our web developers. We do not have any Web
services that require writing data back to the server, so we do not have that
complication to deal with. We also have nothing that writes to a database.
On the CentOS server everything is owned by nobody and has a group of
devs at ad.com.
chown -R nobody:devs at ad.com /var/www/html
File permissions are 574. Note that owners are NOT required to have higher
permissions than groups!
find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 574 {} \;
Directory permissions are 575. The eXecute bit must be set so that Apache can
navigate into the subdirectories.
find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 575 {} \;
The group sticky bit is set on directories. That means any new directories
created by the developers will have a group of devs at ad.com.
find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;
We also set ACLs on the directories so that new files and directories have the
desired permissions. I don't remember the exact command for that. Setfacl is
pretty finicky!
The end result can be a bit messy since new files in the html directory will
be owned by the developer who copied them up. I have not found a way to force
ownership to nobody. That doesn't matter, though, since Apache does not use
owner permissions and web developers get permissions through the group
settings. If you are picky about this, it is easy to set a cron job that runs
chown on a regular basis.
--
Bill Gee
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